Fun with Filtering French

Early use of corpora for language learning has included analysis of word usage via concordancing. In addition, some attempts have been made to use readability criteria for recommending reading to learners. In this paper we discuss various tools and approaches for enhanced language learning support, including different methods of filtering text based on vocabulary and grammatical criteria. We demonstrate the effects of various criteria on the retrieval of text, assuming the user is English-speaking and learning French. Filtering text based on a small vocabulary of frequently occurring words, a set of English-French cognates and named entities, and high coverage criteria, results in the retrieval of short readable extracts from French literature. We expect that text available from the web may yield many more documents of appropriate readability.